


Present Presence

by runtostockholm



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-09
Updated: 2017-07-09
Packaged: 2018-11-30 00:53:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,445
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11452596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runtostockholm/pseuds/runtostockholm
Summary: “Tyler?” He called, pronouncing the ‘r’ for a moment too long.She tried to speak, but her throat decided otherwise—closing up so she was barely audible.“Is there a Tyler here? Tyler?”“Pres—“ She tried, a bit louder this time. She coughed. “Present, Sir.”“I’m not going to say it again. Just the Doctor, thanks, I—“ The man delayed whatever he was about to say next, because he saw her. His jaw had slightly departed from its original position. She hitched a breath. For the first time in three years, seven months and four days, she made eye contact with a familiar storm of brown.Rose thinks a physics class can help her find her way to The Doctor, and unexpectedly it does, in a way she never thought.





	Present Presence

“And with that, I bid you a farewell. I wish you all well, and know you all will go on to do great things.” The professor said, tears twitching in her eyes. “Oh, tomorrow my replacement, Doctor Smith, will be teaching you. For the last time: class dismissed.” The room filled with applause and cheering, a goodbye to their professor of two years, Doctor Finch.  
“Well that was emotional.” Skye Devons remarked, folding away her notes.  
“Well it would be. She’s been our teacher for a year and a bit, goodbyes are always hard.” Rose Tyler replied, closing her bag and lifting it onto her shoulder.  
“True. What do you think the new teacher’s like?” Skye asked, turning to look at rose.  
“’ don’t know. Could be anyone. Don’t even know their gender.”  
“I hope it’s a really hot, mature guy with abs to match his brains.” Skye spoke, dreamingly, a smile painted across her face.  
“You’re a hopeless romantic, Skye, you know that?” Rose laughed, nudging her friend in the ribs with her elbow playfully.  
“So? It’s not a bad thing! Better than slobbing around on the sofa all day.” Skye replied with the same playful tone, but with bitter truth to it.  
“I just…don’t date. It ain’t that bad, just some people just don’t.”  
“Something must have happened though, you never talk about the past.”  
“It just wasn’t that interesting,” Understatement of the century, Rose thought, smirking to herself. “No dramatic break up or scene.” Just being separated by parallel worlds.  
“Do you want chips? I’m dying for chips.” Skye asked, head tilted upwards sniffing the air.  
“Me, too.” Rose replied, feeling relieved that the subject had changed.

“So people have been saying he’s mega rich and really hot.” Skye giggled to the girl in the row behind, Gabrielle, and Rose smiled.  
“How’d they know? He’s only been here a day.” Rose asked, trying to seem interested in the conversations direction.  
“No idea,” Mia, a girl with firey hair and an attitude to match, chirped in, who’d been eavesdropping on the conversation. “But apparently he’s a real genius. Put Jamie Finch to shame when he tried to challenge him on the evolution of sting theory.”  
“No way! You have to tell me how that went.”  
“Well there was shouting, and Finch said—Wait, talk later, ‘Smith’s’ here now.”  
Rose poked a thumb up and slowly rotated her chair around, and opened her text book, awaiting instruction, and turned around mouthing ‘text me later’ to Gabrielle.  
“Alright, class, settle down.” A scottish voice with an English twist shouted over the twittering of students. Rose stopped dead from looking up, holding a breath she hadn’t known she’d been holding.  
“You okay?” Skye asked.  
“Oh yeah, it’s jus’ nothin’” she answered, forcing a tight smile as she dared herself to look up.  
And she saw what she expected.  
A tight blue pinsuit and a mess of brown hair, softer than goose down. Glasses he didn’t need and eyebrows trying to meet his hairline.  
The Doctor. Her Doctor.  
“I would pass around a sheet, but apparently ‘Lord Voldemort’ had attended one of my past lectures.” The class chuckled nervously “Honored as I am, I think that might’ve been a hoax. So we’ll do it the traditional way. Adams?”  
“Present, Sir.”  
“Oh, The Doctor will do, thanks. Brown?”  
Rose was still in both awe and shock. Hearing the voice was both very good – very, very good – but also very bad. It meant something among her campus was probably extraterrestrial and this was his disguise. But it also meant her brilliant doctor was here. Right here, right now. Impossible, yes, but still he was here. He hadn’t seen her, and if he had he wasn’t letting on. But in a sea of ninty-so students it was hard to spot one face, so she decided it must’ve been the former.  
“He’s got everything,” Skye had leant into Rose but she hadn’t noticed, so she jumped slightly. “Brains. That nerdy look. And a body to match the face.” She giggled, unconsciously licking her lips. “What’d you think?”  
“Oh yeah. He’s defiantly something.” She whispered back, smirking at the irony.  
“Tyler?” He called, pronouncing the ‘r’ for a moment too long.  
She tried to speak, but her throat decided otherwise—closing up so she was barely audible.  
“Is there a Tyler here? Tyler?”  
“Pres—“ She tried, a bit louder this time. She coughed. “Present, Sir.”  
“I’m not going to say it again. Just the Doctor, thanks, I—“ The man delayed whatever he was about to say next, because he saw her. His jaw had slightly departed from its original position. She hitched a breath. For the first time in three years, seven months and four days, she made eye contact with a familiar storm of brown.  
“Waters?”  
“Present.”  
“Young?”  
“Here, Sir.”  
“Right. Let us begin.” He called, keeping eye contact with Rose.

“Class dismissed.” The doctor called, eyes skimming the class. “Tyler, can I see you for a moment?”  
“Hey, that’s not fair! You barely spoke in that lesson, why’d he wanna see you?” Skye whispered not too subtley.  
“No idea, Skye.” She looked straight ahead of her; eyes burnings into his eyes  
“Well, the doctor will see you now.” She joked, winking as she turned to descend the room. Rose watched her leave.  
“You wanted to see me?” Rose yelled from where she’d been seating, about fifty meters away at the top of the auditorium.  
“Yeah. For quite a while actually. How the hell are you here, Rose Tyler?”  
“’s not that important.” She replied, walking down the steps towards him, keeping eye contact.  
“Well it is if you’ve ripped the universe to shreds.”  
“Jack did some tests. We’re fine—“  
“Jack knew!?”  
“Yeah.”  
He stared at her like he had so many times, so long ago. His eyes were dark, almost black. He was looking down to here, brows pulled tightly. She was closer now, about three meters from his tight posture. She looked down to her feet.  
“I’m sorry.” She looked up slowly, but on his lower body, scared that the tears resting in her eyes would make her seem weak. He inhaled, and after a while, exhaled. She looked up to his stare, still as intense as before.  
“You could have destroyed multiple worlds.”  
“I know.”  
“And you could have overlapped timelines!”  
“But I didn’t.”  
“But you could have.”  
“But I didn’t, Doctor.”  
His eyes changed from black to a softer shade of dark brown when she said his name. It’d been so long. Too long.  
“So what’ve we got ‘ere then?”  
“What’d you mean?”  
“Well. If a Timelord’s galloping around my university campus outta the blue it probably means some blue alien’s on the run.”  
A smile tinted his mouth. “Red, actually. Zygons. They’re a race of metamorphic humanoids. Walking among you looking like a human, though.”  
“There you are, Mister.” A shout came from the door at the top of the seating area, belonging to a red head whose hands were folded as if she were bothered. She began to make her way towards the pair. “Been waitin’ for you by the TARDIS and you’re yickerin’-yackerin’ to some physics junkie. What’s ya name? Blondie with that hair?”  
“Oi, Donna, lay off.” He gave her a warning look of a tilted head with raised eyebrows. “Donna, this is. Uhm. How’d I say this?” He scratched the back of his neck whilst looking to the corner of his eyes, bowing his head.  
“The name’s Rose. Rose Tyler.”  
Donnas mouth fell open into a face of misbelief, which then turned into a wide smile as she raised a pointed finger at Rose and shifted its point between the two. “You’re Rose Tyler!? Rose Tyler who’s trapped in a parallel world?”  
“That sums me up.” She laughed, adjusting her shoulder bag to distract herself and looked to The Doctor, who quickly flicked his eyes from Rose to Donna, as if he’d been caught staring. Which he had been.  
“Yeah. Now we should probably wrap this up and find that Zygon wandering around.” The Doctor grabbed his trench coat from the back of his stool and wandered towards the door, Donna close behind him. He spun around on his heels.  
“I don’t suppose you…fancy joining us, Miss Tyler?” He asked, a nervous twitch to his voice as it broke slightly mid-sentence, but managed to maintain an anxious smile.  
“Oh. I’d love to, but uhm…I have work to do…gotta write up some notes…” She smiled nervously. She wasn’t sure if she’d be ready to wander again with the Doctor and his new…friend. His smile fell with his glance, and he quickly put his hands in his pockets.  
“Oh. Yeah. Of course. Come on, Donna, lets find that Zygon.” His voice had grown more thin, as if it was hoarse, and began to quicken his pace as he walked toward the exit.  
“I don’t mean I don’t wanna, Doctor.” He turned around as he reached the door, leaning his weight against it. “It’s just that I’ve got some stuff to do. That’s all.” She said, eyebrows middle-raised and lips in a small attempt of a smile.  
“Oh. Yeah. Sure thing!” His enthusiasm as forced as his smile. He turned and left the room, leaving Rose in the room alone.

 

He slid the key effortlessly into the TARDIS like he’d done so many times before, and hurried in, throwing his coat onto one of the corals and went to the console. Donna, however, stood a dozen-or-so meters from the doorway.  
“Zygons would want to be in a class with a lot of students. Blend in. We need to find the biggest classes on campus and check them out.” He ran around to the opposite side of the console, and flicked some switches that seemed to do nothing. “You’ll be a student, checking out for anything weird. Is that alright?” He said, lifting his head, looking to Donna, who was staring at him with raised eyebrows. “What?” He asked.  
“So this is what you’re doing?”  
“Well if we’re going to catch this Zygon the we have to—“  
“Not the Alien you idiot. After what? Three years? You finally see this woman you barely talk about, and yet somehow simultaneously mention all the time, and what? We just continue with ‘Hunt the Zygon?’  
He flicked his eyes back down to the controls. “She made herself quite clear. She didn’t want to come back.”  
“You don’t know that.”  
“Yes, I do, Donna. She would have jumped into the unknown. Like the old times. Before she—“ He cut himself short and coughed, before looking at Donna again. “She’s changed.”  
“People don’t change. They just adjust. She was in shock.”  
“You don’t know what she was like.”  
“Maybe not. But I am a human and female. You’re a…” She gestured to him “and male. From where I was standing she was just overwhelmed and scared. She does wanna be mates with you, Doctor. Just not while she has to process the recent event.”  
He looked past her in concentration, and then flicked his eyes to her. He smiled thankfully, and she returned it sympathetically. That was all there was to say.  
“So this Zygon…?” She asked, changing the subject  
“Yes!” He replied, flicking even more pointless switches.

Rose opened the door to her flat, placed her keys in the bowl on the counter and folders next to it, took off her shoes, and padded through the hallway towards the kitchen. Like she did every day after class. But this was not a day that could sit in a routine.  
“Rose! You’re back! Get in here, it’s urgent!” Skye called from the living room.  
“What is it?” She called, rushing in, to see her three roomates, Skye, Anna and Zoe all looking at one phone between them on the largest sofa.  
“Anna doesn’t know what to reply with to Charlie. He said ‘Do you meet up later? x’ but that could mean he’s asking both our groups out together or a date. What’d you think?” Skye replied, as the three girls looked to rose expectantly and Skye passed her the phone.  
“Oh I…I don’t know.” Rose replied, rubbing her temple with her left hand.  
“Told you we wouldn’t get much from her.” Zoe mumbled not too quietly.  
“Fine.” Rose barked as she gave a long, opened mouth look. “He said ‘you’ when he could have said ‘you and the rest’, which would have been obvious to what ‘hanging out’ meant, and the fact that he didn’t means probably you alone. Just say ‘That’d be great, I’ll see you at 9 in Joey’s Bar’ and if his mates turn up just say we all left something at the house and you’re there to save some seats and we’ll be there asap.” Rose replied, throwing the phone to Anna’s lap, whom it belonged to. Rose stormed out and went to the safety of her room, slamming the door and crawling under the duvet of her bed to hug a pillow, before staring into the darkness and thinking about what had happened in the past day.  
She’d seen the Doctor. He hadn’t regenerated. He was still him. Still the man she’d loved. He’d smiled at her and stared at her like she was the only person in the room throughout the whole lecture. Wasn’t she special to him? Maybe so in the past - but now he seemed to have this ‘Donna’ girl. She couldn’t shake the thought that Sarah Jane was right; that she was just one in a string of potential lovers. Rose screamed into the pillow as she burrowed deeper into it. A light knock came from the door.  
“Who is it?” She asked, muffled by the pillow.  
“Just me.” Skye replied as she came in, and sat on the edge of the bed. “You okay? I bring tea.”  
“Yeah.”  
“You don’t seem it.”  
“Long story.”  
“I can sit for a while.”  
Rose emerged from under the cover to looked at her friend before sliding next to her to take the tea.  
“It’d take five billion years.”  
“That’s a bit of an over exaggeration!” Skye laughed.  
“Trust me.” Rose took a sip of her tea. “Thanks for the tea.” She smiled.  
“Tea makes everything better.” Skye joked, but looked worried as Rose’s face fell as a memory flashed the Doctor coming out his regeration coma after the smell of tea.  
‘I don’t do domestics.’ He’d said.  
That didn’t stop him from pulling a cracker, wearing a paper hat and digging into a Christmas meal.  
“It does.” She replied as she leant her head on the Skye's shoulder.


End file.
